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The workforce of ScottishPower, the energy company, is now using Hymans Robertson’s Guided Outcomes technology. GO is a simple online solution that helps Defined Contribution (DC) pension savers meet retirement income goals by setting an income target and helping savers make decisions to get on track to meet it.

Anne Harris, UK Pensions Manager at ScottishPower said:

At ScottishPower we have around 2,500 members in our Stakeholder Pension Plan. Like many businesses we wanted to be sure that our people understood how much they would need to be saving in to their pension arrangement so that they could afford to retire at the right time for them. We wanted to avoid people getting close to their planned retirement age only to find they needed to work longer. That’s not great for them, or for managing our workforce. Using GO we can now educate scheme members about how much money they might need in retirement, how much they might get and how they might address any gap. Every member has received a personalised statement of their own situation and in the first few days we’ve already had a third of the membership use the site. Using GO we’ll be able to drive up pension saving levels, helping members afford to retire on track. Engagement has been high, with a third of the users on the site using the functionality to investigate the best way to get back on track and over 10% making immediate changes to save more. We’ve had some great feedback from members, telling us that the site is ‘intuitive and easy to understand’ as well as providing them with ‘the impetus to do something about it’. This is exactly what we were hoping for. GO also gives us a communications and governance framework to manage the membership over time. This will enable us to make more effective decisions over our pensions and reward strategy using the analytics of savings behaviours that GO provides.

ScottishPower adopting GO is a significant milestone and demonstrates that GO is leading the market in changing pension savings behaviour for the DC generation. Our approach of focussing on outcomes for employees has set the standard for measuring workplace savings success. We have an unrivalled knowledge of the issues facing employers, trustees and scheme members – and uniquely proven expertise to put solutions in place that will make a real difference. Our approach of continued technology evolution driven by actual member behaviour will deliver significant additional benefits for ScottishPower and other clients in 2016. This includes targeted education and decision-making support for those that are getting closer to retirement. Clearly with freedom and choice the decisions retirees now have to make are far more complicated. It’s essential that they get adequate support, and that they get this some years in advance of their actual retirement date, to be able to make the right decisions.

Discussing the future of workplace support around pension saving and planning, he concluded:

When we speak to employers, and through research we’ve undertaken, it’s clear that they are justifiably concerned that unless employees are given access to the right information, in the right format at the right time, they will end up working for far longer than they expect – or making decisions at retirement that could have far reaching adverse consequences. Our research among employees shows that they expect their employers to give them the support they desperately need; and that employers are keen to provide it. Our analysis of around 50 pension schemes and 400,000 DC members through GO shows that two thirds are currently not saving enough. It doesn’t have to be that way. Members need to be given solutions that work for them, not just more ways of telling them what a problem they have. Technology has a big role to play, enabling employers to introduce solutions that can change behaviour on a mass scale over a sustained period of time. It’s important to remember that people’s circumstances and the pension landscape continually evolve. For any model to be effective it must support all members through these changes, not just be relevant at a point in time. Guided Outcomes is a great way of doing that.